Friday, 13 May 2016

Baby Killers by Sam Blake

For
me, getting characters right in fiction is all about motivation, trying to get
inside their psyche to understand what makes them tick, what makes them
transgress the law, and their own morality, to kill. I spend a lot of my spare
time plotting murder, and it’s essential to me, in order to make my characters
feel really real, to find out what the factors are that contribute to their
behaviour.

Inspiration
for story strikes in the strangest ways – as writers we hear snippets of
conversation or read something in the paper and the germ of an idea forms.That ‘light bulb’ moment collides with
another, and then another, and then the story grows. But even
as I plotted Little Bones, meeting
and getting to know the characters who arrived in my head, visiting the
locations where they live (they are all real), I still didn’t know what had
actually happened – how or why the bones of a tiny baby had ended up in, of all
places, the hem of a wedding dress. Despite hours of research looking for an
explanation, researching baby killers, it was in fact only as I wrote the scene
in which one key witness is giving a statement to my protagonists, Detective
Garda Cathy Connolly and DI Dawson O’Rourke, that I found out, with some
relief, exactly what had happened and why.

Research is key to any
novel, particularly crime fiction where the reader is a stickler for detail and
is often an expert on forensic technique. While I was trying to get to the
bottom of my story, and the motivation behind what makes people kill their
children – or other people’s -I came
across all sorts of true and terrible tales about baby killers – all as you can
imagine, making gruelling reading.

In August 2005, China Arnold was accused of
killing her 3-week-old daughter in - and this really defies belief - a
microwave oven. Investigators in Dayton Ohio said the baby, Paris Talley, was
burned to death in the oven after Arnold and her boyfriend had an argument over
who the child's biological father was. Arnold was sentenced to life in prison
without parole in September 2008. Judge Mary Wiseman told Arnold during the
trial, "No adjectives exist to adequately describe this heinous atrocity.
This act is shocking and utterly abhorrent for a civilized society."

Roll
forward to 2015 and in upstate New York a
shallow grave marked with sticks and leaves was the location where police found
the battered body of a two-month-old Bronx boy beaten to death by his own
father, who was apparently angry that the baby’s mother wasn’t paying him
enough attention.

As the Daily News states, “Little
Mason Whyte Feliciano’s helpless but routine cries were apparently the last
straw.

What followed was a ten day odyssey
that included a merciless murder, a threat to kill again, a convoluted
cover-up, a frantic drive, a random burial spot, a psychotic breakdown, a
therapeutic confession, a hunt for a tiny body and — finally — the arrest of a
domineering, narcissistic, heartless abuser-turned killer, authorities said.”

The stuff of nightmares – the cops I
know regularly say that truth is stranger than fiction.

My husband was a member of An Garda Síochána (the
Irish police force) for thirty years. These cases are the type that an officer
will never forget – and in the coastal town of Dun Laoghaire where he was
stationed for part of his service, there are few who will forget the Dalkey
baby case.In 1973 a baby’s body was
found in an alley close to the Garda station. Wrapped in a plastic bag the
little girl had been stabbed over forty times with a knitting needle. The
investigation at the time was deeply flawed and the results inconclusive, and
in 2007, when the baby’s mother came forward, and the case was re-examined by senior counsel Patrick Gageby, it was found that
“most of the surrounding documents, sometime after that date, were lost or
mislaid”. When Cynthia Owens made her statement, it became very clear that a
paedophile ring was operating from ‘the house of horrors’ as it became known
and the Murphy family were systematically abusing as well as selling their
children.

For the reader to be sucked completely into a
fictional world, the ring of truth must be loud, but every writer has a duty to
respect the victims and those affected by real life crime.Little Bones is set in a
real place, but the characters and plot is entirely fictional – it tells of the
investigation that unfolds when twenty four year old Cat Connolly makes a
discovery that shocks her to the core – even more so because she is very
single, very young, and, all set to retain her national kickboxing title for a
fourth time, she has recently discovered she’s pregnant - and her world is
falling in. Little Bones it is about
the search for the truth, about what happened, about how it happened, and why. But
for Cat, investigating what appears to be an old case, the consequences are
very real, very current and utterly devastating.

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for
Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The
Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the national writing resources
website Writing.ie. She is Ireland's
leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling
authors to publication. Vanessa has been writing fiction since her husband set
sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book.

Little Bones is the
first in the Cat Connolly Dublin based detective thriller trilogy. When a
baby’s bones are discovered in the hem of a wedding dress, Detective Garda
Cathy Connolly is face with a challenge that is personal as well as
professional – a challenge that has explosive consequences.

Follow Sam Blake on Twitter
@writersamblake or Vanessa @inkwellhq – be warned, they get tetchy with each
other!